Chapter 28: Firestorm
Emily was happy that despite the rarefied surroundings she was able to arrange a reasonable approximation of a normal vacation. Apart from Kara and Caitlin going flying their activities had been mundane: reading books from the library, watching DVDs, walking the trails, swimming in the indoor pool. Kara hadn’t had a swimsuit, but as always the staff was ready with whatever they needed. Emily tried not to rely on that too much as she didn’t want the girls to get used to being waited on. She didn’t think it was healthy.
She did indulge Kara’s desire to go horseback riding, and she and Caitlin watched as Kara competently rode one of the horses the First Family kept at Camp David. Kara was all smiles when she finished, especially, she said, since she wasn’t stiff or sore.
Caitlin had cajoled Kara into playing catch. Kara still cringed every time the ball flew at her, but was slowly getting used to it.
Caitlin was happy she could throw the ball as hard as she wanted. She teased Kara that she threw like a girl, and Kara asked sweetly if she should throw as hard as she could instead.
Thanksgiving dinner was more of the same: simple fare like what they might have had at home. Emily found herself finally starting to unwind, and the girls followed her lead.
Although she didn’t want to spoil the girls, she let them have free rein with dessert. Tonight they were having banana splits. Emily usually avoided desserts, but it being Thanksgiving she was splurging with some pumpkin pie.
They were halfway through dessert when an agent walked into the dining room.
Jarrod, as a senior agent, had the rest of the weekend off and had gone home to have Thanksgiving dinner with his parents and sister in Virginia. He’d be back on Sunday. They didn’t know the agents who were guarding them for the rest of the weekend, but as always they were courteous and unobtrusive.
“Dr. Jordan?”
Emily tore her eyes away from Kara’s banana split. “Yes?”
“We received word of a six-alarm fire in Kansas City, Missouri. We can get the news on the monitor in here.”
As if on command, the large display mounted on the wall came to life and showed a local TV broadcast. A large mall under construction was on fire, and the flames leapt high into the air.
Emily looked over at Kara, then back to the agent. “Are there any people at risk? It looks like they won’t be able to save the buildings anyway.” She didn’t want Kara to have to run off whenever someone wanted her if lives weren’t at stake.
“There are some homes in the area, Doctor, and the fire chief is concerned it will spread. The wind is blowing burning embers.”
She looked over to Kara, who was alternating her gaze between the display and her banana split.
“What do you think, honey?”
Kara fiddled nervously with her spoon. “Maybe I should go? I wouldn’t want people’s houses to catch fire.”
Emily nodded. “If you want to. Don’t worry about your dessert; we can—”
Kara blurred and the dessert was gone; she stifled a burp. “Excuse me.” She blurred out of the room and was back as Supergirl. She hugged Emily and Caitlin. “I’ll try to be fast so we can still watch a movie tonight.”
“Be careful, honey.”
Kara nodded and blurred out of the room.
• • •
Kara stared at the inferno below her, horrified. It looked
much worse than it had on TV. The flames towered hundreds of feet into the air, like a city made of fire, trailing off into thick black smoke that rose high into the sky. Even up here she could feel the intense heat.
Where was she supposed to start? What was she supposed to
do? She had amazing powers, but that didn’t mean she always knew how to apply them.
She surveyed the scene. The large assemblage of trucks and firefighters was dwarfed by the size of the conflagration. They were clustered on the side near a housing development, attempting to prevent the blaze from spreading. Media trucks and camera crews congregated farther away, at a relatively safe distance.
She knew her dad used his freezing breath on fires sometimes, but would it work on something this size? She hadn’t even tried it yet.
She floated down to an edge of the fire that wasn’t near anything; the heat was even more intense this close. She took a breath and blew.
Nothing happened.
It hadn’t felt particularly super-y, more like blowing out the candles on a birthday cake. She must have done it wrong. Maybe she needed to take a deeper breath?
She took a really deep breath, and blew again.
This time it felt quite cold coming out, but it had no observable effect on the fire; the flames didn’t even waver.
Kara crossed her arms and huffed in frustration.
Maybe she needed to take a
really deep breath? But how deep? Just how deep a breath could she take?
She started breathing in, and just didn’t stop. She kept breathing and breathing, long after common sense said she shouldn’t be able to continue. After about ten seconds she was just starting to feel a little full. She decided to try it now.
She blew her breath out as fast as she could. This time it felt extremely cold, colder than she’d felt in the Arctic. She expected to see condensation in the air, but the air was so dry from the fire there wasn’t any moisture in it.
Where her breath struck the flames the fire simply went out, and the glow of the embers faded quickly. However, the wind caused by her breath fanned the surrounding flames even higher. When she stopped a very small section of the fire was out, but flames slowly started to creep back in again.
Kara sighed. Maybe if she breathed until she couldn’t breathe in any more?
This time she breathed in for a good thirty seconds, until finally she felt like she couldn’t take any more air in. Then she let it all go as quickly as she could.
There was white fog in the path of her breath, but it wasn’t water vapor: carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and oxygen were condensing out of the air from the extreme cold. The flames went out instantly where her breath struck, and the high wind blew the fire out in surrounding sections, leaving glowing embers that cooled quickly.
When she was done, a section of the fire was out, but it wasn’t a large section. The fire was so huge, it would take her many hours to finish at this rate. At least she could help on the side facing the endangered houses.
Kara frowned. If she wanted to put the whole thing out, she was going to have to figure out a better way to do this.
• • •
Fire Chief Andrew Glass watched as Kara floated slowly across the face of the blaze. It took her half a minute to charge up her breath, then a second to put out a small section of the fire. Together with their pumps, they were starting to get it under control, but they had a long way to go. The flames were still threatening the housing development nearby.
After twenty minutes of this she floated down and landed next to Chief Glass.
“You’re having the same problem we are,” he said. “We’re pumping all we can, but it’s so huge that we’re barely making a dent.”
“Is there any way to pump more water?”
“Not really,” he said. “The water pressure is already dangerously low from what we’re pumping now.” He shook his head. “It’s funny, the Missouri River’s a mile away, but we can’t get enough water.”
Kara tilted her head. “Is there any way I could get the water here?”
The Chief paused, nonplussed. “Well… I don’t know. You’d need a big bucket.” His eyes strayed towards the bulldozers and front-end loaders that had been in use for construction. “Why don’t we try it?” He shouted to one of his lieutenants. “Harrison! Ask the owners if they mind our ‘repurposing’ one of their front-end loaders.” The man raised a phone to his ear and spoke for a while.
“They say go ahead!” Harrison shouted back.
“Do you need a hand?” asked Chief Glass.
“Um, let me look.” Kara lifted up and flew over to the machine with the largest bucket, then peered at where it was attached. There were a whole bunch of pistons and axles and things, and she didn’t know where to start. She looked back to the fire chief and shrugged.
He pantomimed taking something in his hands and ripping it apart.
Kara felt guilty about breaking an expensive machine, but reached out with her hands and separated the bucket from the support on one side. To her it felt as easy as tearing construction paper, but there was a scream of rending metal and it broke free. She went to the other side and did the same thing, then lifted the now-free bucket and flew upwards. News cameras followed her as she went.
She spotted the river and zipped over, slowed somewhat by the unwieldy bucket. It was the work of a few seconds to fill it. She flew back to the fire and dumped out the contents on a section of the flames.
There was an enormous cloud of steam; when it cleared, part of the fire was out. It was slightly larger than the area she’d been able to blow out directly with her breath. She sighed.
She landed and lay the bucket down, then zipped back to the Chief. “It’s a little better than blowing, but not much.”
Glass scratched his head. “I can’t think of anything bigger you can use. Too bad you can’t move it without a bucket.” He frowned. “Or maybe…”
“What?”
“Do you know how clouds are formed?”
Kara thought for a moment. “Like, the water cycle? Sure! There was a
Magic School Bus book about it.”
Chief Glass paused again, an odd look on his face. “Um, yes, right. Warm water evaporates, rises, then condenses and falls as rain.”
“Huh,” said Kara, her arms folded. She shrugged. “I guess I can try it.”
She darted up and over to the river again. She looked down into the water and noticed that there were a few fish and some other aquatic life. She winced; they probably were not going to survive this. If they did they sure weren’t going to like it.
She zipped back and forth along the river, turning her heat vision on it. The water started to steam along a large section, and white clouds began to waft upwards, borne by rising hot air. Rapids began to form on either side of the section she was heating as new water poured in to replace what was evaporating.
Even though they were a mile away, people turned and stared in awe as a cloud began to form and billow above the river, silhouetted by the setting sun. It was white at first, then started to turn gray. The men and women pumping water couldn’t turn and look, but the others and the news crews watched silently as an eleven year old girl wielded a power once ascribed to the gods.
Kara felt rain droplets start to fall on her and decided she’d better use her cloud before it fell back down to the ground. She zipped up, took a deep breath, and blew.
All that did was turn a section of the cloud cold; that one section moved in the direction of the fire, raining as it went. The water fell uselessly back into the river and the surrounding area.
She frowned. She needed some way to move the entire cloud. If only there were a big fan of some kind, but there was nothing like that in the neighborhood.
Maybe she could be a fan herself?
She started turning cartwheels in place, faster and faster. At first nothing happened, but she tried angling her arms and legs, and eventually saw that she was blowing the cloud in the right direction — again, though, only a portion of it.
She zipped back and forth, up and down at super-speed as she spun; the effect was as if there were a few dozen of her, blowing from several positions. The wind was applied over a wider area and slowly, the entire cloud began to drift towards the fire. She continued to play human fan, surprised that all the spinning and jumping about wasn’t giving her motion sickness, but she felt fine.
As the cloud drifted over the fire she stopped spinning then watched, horrified, as the heat of the flames started to dissipate all her hard work.
Then she remembered the other half of the water cycle. She breathed in deeply and darted through her cloud, seeding it with blasts of freezing breath.
The cloud turned from gray to black and started to rain down on the fire: first sprinkles, then a shower, then a downpour, then a cloudburst. Several hundred tons of water fell on the fire in the space of half a minute. When the cloud was gone, she looked down.
The fire was still burning, but much less intensely; great clouds of steam were rising as the water reevaporated. She flitted about cooling the steam, forcing it to fall as rain again. When she was done the fire was greatly reduced.
She looked down to the Chief; he was motioning her to go back and do it again, so she did. Fifteen minutes later, with some help from the front-end loader bucket to douse the remaining pockets, the fire was out.
• • •
Kara went to set the bucket down, then flew back to land by Chief Glass.
“Young lady,” he said, “that has to be the most amazing thing I’ve seen in my entire life. You just saved my crew an enormous amount of very dangerous work and saved a whole bunch of people from losing their homes. Thank you! Maybe we’ll get to have Thanksgiving dinner after all.” He reached out a hand.
Kara blushed as she shook his hand. “Umm, thank you, but it was your idea. I don’t think I would’ve thought of that myself.”
He laughed heartily. “Thinking it up was easy! Doing it was the hard part.”
There were shouts from the press, who had been allowed forward now that the fire was out. “Supergirl! Supergirl!” Kara turned to look; they were waving her over.
She bit her lip, indecisive. Emily had said not to have her picture taken, but that was back before she’d been exposed. She pulled her cape around and x-rayed her phone in the pocket there: it was around 8 PM, and they still had time for a movie when she got back.
She looked up at Chief Glass; he was waiting patiently with an inquiring look. “I need to get back to my family, but… I guess I have a little while?”
“If you don’t mind then it’s OK.” He waved her on ahead of him. “Ladies first.”
She and the Chief walked over to the press barricade. The reporters exploded with questions, all talking at once; Kara flinched slightly.
A press liaison from the Kansas City Fire Department had joined them, a young man in a suit. He held up his hands. “Whoa, whoa, folks! Please, let’s do this in an orderly fashion. Just a moment.” The crowd quieted down.
He turned to Kara. “Is this OK, Supergirl?”
“I can’t stay very long, but I guess I can talk a little.”
“OK, then… first question… you.” He pointed.
“Ted Croft, Action News 41. Supergirl, how did you make it rain on the fire?”
“Oh, that was Mr. Glass’s idea; he suggested it. I used my heat vision on the river, to make lots of water vapor. Then I kind of did cartwheels in the air to be a fan, to blow the cloud over. Then I used my breath on the cloud to cool it down and make it rain.” She smiled. “I didn’t get it all right the first time, though.”
The press liaison pointed. “You next.”
“Mara Robertson, Fox News 4. Supergirl, where were you when you heard about the fire?”
“We were eating dinner. Um, dessert.”
“Thanksgiving dinner?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
At the White House, the President, his family, and their guests were watching on TV, interrupting their party. The President’s youngest daughter turned to her father and said, “She’s
awesome, Daddy. Can we have her here to visit? I want to meet her.” She listened a moment more. “Oh, they’re staying at Camp David? Can we go there?”
The President had his professional smile fixed on his face, watching Supergirl hold a totally unsupervised, unscripted, impromptu press conference. Sadly, no one had thought to tell her not to do so; he was sure that if they had, she would comply. It was just hard to remember that though she could lift jumbo jets, fly into space, and change the weather, she was only eleven and did not know as a matter of course to ask for help before talking to the press.
He watched each response carefully to see if she blurted out something she shouldn’t. The bit about Camp David came close, though they’d been planning a press release on that
after the weekend was over. “We’ll see, Sophie. It’s complicated.”
Sophie frowned, her arms folded. “
Everything is always ‘complicated.’”
It sure is, he thought. Too bad banging your head on the table wasn’t Presidential.
• • •
